✍ 003. pardon me miss ➝ hazel
Oaklee’s lips tugged up into a meek smile when he sensed her reaction, and it was inevitable for him not to feel happy about it. It being the way Hazel looked at him like he was important, like he actually mattered. Such a rare feeling for him, and how good it felt. Good wasn’t even the right word, and he hopped along through the road of his vocabulary to search for it. The only thing he could really come up with was exquisite, or eternally lovely, something that would sound way too odd for him to say aloud. It was all a mess really, this thing that he was doing, and he hoped that it stopped. To clarify, that thing being the self-loathing that was always getting in the way of how he felt for people, because it always seemed to stick it’s brown-nosing self into his business and that was just plain rude. A part of him hoped that it would be alright at one point, though Oaklee knew that would only come if he had Hazel. And she wasn’t a possession to him, not like that. She was his everything. The reason for his smile, the reason he decided to get up and face the day every morning. The most beautiful and photographable thing was her. There wasn’t really a point to anything else. At least, not to Oaklee.
"You think so? I’m glad." Even though it was true, Oaklee couldn’t find it in him to tell Hazel that was nearly his first kiss. The first one that made his cheeks hot and his eyelashes flutter and just make him feel weightless. There had been other girls that he had been with, like that, yeah, and it never came to his mind to kiss him. It was usually a night after Bentley got him super drunk, and he couldn’t deal with being lonely anymore. Bentley had insisted that the girls would help, but little did he know that they were all fucking him because of how he looked — because he looked like Bentley Vaughn the model. That was a secret he would never dare to share. Especially not with Hazel. His past wasn’t important, and definitely not as important as his now. Over the music, he asked her, "You want to dance?" It was a silly question, but of course that was how these things worked. And the thoughts that came after that were ones he pushed back, locked away in a drawer that would rattle on ceaselessly.
Hazel pressed her lips together tightly, curling up the corners as she flicked her eyes at the tips of his red hot ears. It made her giggle that she made him nervous; that she made him blush and try to hide the red color flushing his cheeks. It made her feel giddy for some inexplicable reason, which left her blushing as well. She still couldn't fathom how that was actually her first actual kiss, and she had only turned twenty years old in June. Even just being in Oaklee's presence made her feel like she was fifteen years old again -- gauche and anxious, even though she's not ashamed to admit that she's still partially like that now. Hazel hadn't even noticed that she felt a pair of eyes burning into the side of her head, which made her weary of who that might be. Here she was, lingering in a club that she didn't fit in at, basking in the ambiance of Oaklee. She was almost positive that she looked like an idiot as she stared off into space. Her head snapped up to look at the taller boy at her side, a nervous smile on his lips that made her turn crimson and hide her face to the world. Her head bobbed up and down in response, smiling at the boy as he accepted her compliment.
Hazel had once drifted off into dreamland, clinging to Oaklee's side as the heavy music beat her eardrums to death. She was currently tracing the cross tattoo inked on his left hand in between his thumb and his index finger, smiling slightly as her painted-white nail rubbed softly over the raised flesh by his tattoo, still in the midst of her thoughts. That is, until she heard his voice ringing in her near-deaf ears. Her stomach jumbled with nerves, considering that she probably wasn't the best dancer in the whole entire world, and the boy that she was most infatuated with just asked her to dance on the dance floor. Aside from taking ballet classes from when she was five years old to seven years old, she had little to no dance experience. The only other dances she had ever been to was a middle school dance in which she lingered by the walls of the gymnasium, and to her junior and senior prom where she went with some guy who ditched her for a bottle blonde with a dress way too low for a school dance. But this was going to be different than all of those high school dances, and she could already tell. Hazel nodded, gripping tighter onto Oaklee's hand with a Cheshire cat grin on her stained lips. "Of course," she replied sweetly, tugging softly on his arm and snaking her way out onto the dance floor, giggling at the fact of how much she would embarrass herself tonight.
